In May and June 2011, we held Inmagic Training and Ideas Days in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa and Toronto. We talked to over 90 attendees over the course of those sessions, and showed them tips and tricks for Inmagic DB/TextWorks and WebPublisher Pro and demonstrated some new and exciting discovery interfaces.

After each session we followed up with a survey and were pleased to receive very high satisfaction levels for all courses, including 95% satisfied or very satisfied for the discovery interfaces sessions. Comments from attendees of these sessions were:

“It's good to learn about discovery interfaces. I think they will become a trend and play an important role in the future.”

“Introduction to a new concept - I had not really been aware of this in the library context and found it very interesting”

“I found it very useful that you could drill down to specifics, rather than know exactly what you are looking for from the start.”

We felt that the DB/TextWorks sessions were the core of the whole program and probably contained the most pertinent information for all so we encouraged as many people as possible to attend. Upon completion, attendees received a copy of our Andornot Starter Kit database for the desktop, containing many customized forms and scripts. Overall we had an 89% satisfied or very satisfied level for these sessions. And we were pleased to see that 81% of attendees would recommend the DB/TextWorks session to colleagues or contacts. Several people mentioned that one of the most useful pieces of information that they went away with was knowledge of “Keyboard Shortcuts”. Others liked the “Dead URL link checker” and commented “I didn't know it existed!”

The WebPublisher PRO sessions was perhaps the most difficult for us to teach as we tried to show “out-of-the-box” examples. For clients who know Andornot; this is not the way we normally operate. We have long since moved beyond that level with our Andornot Starter Kit for the web, including custom cart, templating system, etc. During the session we demonstrated features that all users can apply to their systems, for example canned searches (using our search cannery), permalinks, and a simple commenting system. We ended the session with a show and tell of many of our designed sites. Attendees gave us an 88% satisfied or very satisfied rating and took away an RSS feed utility and a Query Logger database upon completion. One attendee commented that “it was useful to be shown how much Inmagic [WebPublisher] can be customized” and others were very keen on the Permalinks set-up.

Thank you to those who attended the sessions and filled out the survey. If any Inmagic users are interested in having us come to their community this fall or spring of next year, let us know. If we have enough interest we will schedule sessions. We also offer personal or web-based training; contact us training@andornot.com for further information.